Having just beaten Shadowgrounds, I thought I'd like to write up an review for it. I will be breaking up the review in sections, such as: Story, Sound, Gameplay, etc... Just a bit of a WARNING here, this review WILL contain spoilers.
Story
The story of Shadowgrounds is probably the weakest part of the game. To be blunt, I feel the story is very unoriginal. It's set in the future, year 2096, and on Jupiter's moon Ganymede, which was terraformed. It now has about 8,000 people living on it, and the character you play as, Tyler, is a mechanic with military background. You eventually find out there's also alien species on Ganymede with the humans. Obviously you start to get reports that people are dying and/or missing, so you're sent on several rescue missions that don't result in very much. After the search missions, you make a distress call to a shuttle passing Ganymede's orbit, and it's shot down by what appears to be an alien mother ship. You then attempt to shoot down the mother ship and of course that fails, so you take the captured alien pod to the mother ship and try to blow it up from the inside. Well, just before you do that, the collective consciousness of the aliens give you a story on how they were trying to help the humans from killing themselves off and they wouldn't listen, obviously that causes them to realize the error of their mistakes and they defuse the bomb.Sound & Music
Okay, now it's time to talk about the sound effects, voice, music and all that relates. First and foremost, I want to get voice out of the way and say that the voice acting of Shadowgrounds is just a tad below par. The character, Jane, has the worst voice acting in the game, it just feels like there's no emotion in her lines at all. Now that doesn't mean everyone else's lines are perfect, there are quite a few other lines that feel just as bad as Jane's. However, Tyler's voice actor is probably the best voice actor, and I would say the alien's collective consciousness comes in 2nd... When it comes to sound effects, the aliens, weapons and various environmental things were all fairly well done. Likewise, most of the combat songs, if you will, were well done. Though I have to say the ambient "music" were a little too ambient for my tastes.Gameplay
And now lets talk about the gameplay. The gameplay of Shadowgrounds is very basic, it's your standard top-down view, third person shoot 'em up. You have guns, you aim, you shoot and hope you hit the target and kill it. While it doesn't bring anything new to the genre, and I'm being serious about that, it's still pretty fun for all you shooter fans out there. (though, it did start to feel tedious to me a few hours into it, so breaks may be a must.) You have your basic pistol with unlimited ammo, assault rifle, shotgun, flamethrower, grenade launcher, chaingun, laser/plasma gun, rocket launcher, railgun and lightning gun... The boss fights of the game were pretty exciting, but far too little of them. For example, there are far more ambush sequences, and those tend to get annoying. And speaking of those, I think the game was pretty easy on normal difficulty, which is what I played it on. They give you 4 re-spawns for every level, and I have not once run out of all 4. I came close to using all 4, but still managed. So while the game isn't that challenging on Normal and Easy, it does have Hard, Very Hard and Impossible difficulties. The game also features local co-op for up 4 players. 1 using keyboard and mouse, the rest using joypads.Visuals
Last but not least, lets talk about the visuals of Shadowgrounds. Now, Shadowgrounds was made back in 2006, so obviously it doesn't have earth-shattering visuals. However, I feel that it still looks pretty nice, especially from such a small team over at Frozenbyte. (Infact, I almost consider them indie) The game lacks physics from what I can tell, but, that's not a major loss in a top-down view shoot 'em up. I think that the flashlight was probably the best looking part of the visuals, they have it down very well. And you have to use the flashlight very often because of way Shadowgrounds is set in. As in, the setting in the game doesn't have much light, because as we all know, survival horror means that there's going to be little to no light at all.Conclusion
Okay, so, despite some of the negative elements about Shadowgrounds, I still feel it's a tad under-rated. It's worth playing, even if just one time. It doesn't cost a lot, so you're really not wasting money. (as of this writing, it's priced at only $9.99 on Steam) And it's really not all that short, so I believe you'll get your money's worth out of it, and it's still fun despite the bad story and the not so great voice acting. To conclude this review, I rate Shadowgrounds at 2.5 out of 5.Website: http://shadowgroundsgame.com
Fish Bowl Rating:
(Out of 5)
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